Here is a last word. A worldview without forgiveness, such as the worldview of CRT, offers no hope. There is no vision of a world in which this sin is defeated or redeemed, much less one in which the guilty are forgiven and restored. But the great message the gospel brings to the world and serves as a reminder to the church is this: When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven” (Luke 5:20).
How easy it is for us to feel guilty and to make others feel guilty. The damning accusation of racism divides both the culture and the church because it is one of the most deeply felt indictments one could hear. Such an indictment creates guilt and shame in the accused, yet it is deeply subjective. Anyone trying to know whether someone else, or even oneself, is racist is making a subjective evaluation, which is, therefore, inevitably divisive. Has a racist offense been given or taken? Is it systemic? Is it the result of personal insecurity? Was it intended? Did it stem from hatred? It would seem that on this subject there will always be dissention, especially since the current ideology is now using such subjective assumptions politically, promising to produce national and societal unity. Such an approach, I daresay, will never attain unity. On the contrary; it stirs up dissent and bitterness.
Determining Guilt
Vasko Kohlmayer, born and raised in formerly communist Czechoslovakia,[1] has written a deep analysis of modern culture in which he identifies various forms of guilt that arise from those accused of racism.[2] Some, he points out, are guilty out of fear, fear of the politically correct negative repercussions or outright punishment for disagreeing with modern racist theories. Others “do not wish to stand out or draw unwanted attention to themselves.” Some whites “keep pushing the idea of America the racist because they receive some benefit from it, be it political power, money, or influence.” In this category Kohlmayer places “white politicians who seek to increase their share of black vote through this kind of demagoguery.” Kohlmayer, a first-hand witness of communism in his youth, can imagine some who just love “the plain satisfaction of wreaking havoc in their country.” Others confess to guilt because they wish to “make the impression of being good, compassionate and enlightened.” This is doubtless the reason why the charge of racism will continue to be heard, as a convenient source of accusation and of personal moral superiority for a long time to come.[3]
Recognizing the deep place of guilt in human society, Kohlmayer asks, “What is the real source of this guilt and why do they so eagerly embrace the false charge of racism as an excuse for their public acts of self-flagellation?”
He concludes that “some white Americans are so eager to plead guilty when charged with the (nonexistent) charge of racism” because “it gives them a convenient scapegoat on which to pin the sense of guilt that gnaws on the human psyche. [T]hey seize on this false opportunity in hope of cleansing themselves of their sense of sinfulness.”[4]
Kohlmayer is convinced that “whatever faults the United States may have…it is certainly not a racist society.” In his article,[5] he reminds us that the American system often favors black people at the expense of the rest; that America has not been institutionally racist for a good half a century; that the United States is the number one immigration destination of black people worldwide; that instead of court cases accusing authorities of abusing civil rights laws, there are hundreds of black mayors, Representatives, Senators, District attorneys, and a black president elected twice. He concludes: “the charges of racism against America are plainly untrue.”
In spite of the dubious nature of the charge of systemic racism, the Department of Education and mainstream media are supporting efforts to indoctrinate our children with critical race theory, which makes the general accusation that there is widespread systemic racism against black and Hispanic Americans in modern American society, requiring extensive government redress.[6]
Defining Racism
But there is another massive problem in addition to the problem of guilt, namely the entirely subjective and nebulous definition of racism itself. If racism cannot be clearly defined, the accused find themselves grappling with guilt for indefinable reasons.
A case in point is a popular proponent of antiracism, Ibram X. Kendi, the extraordinarily wealthy “expert” on racism, whom Time Magazine names as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Kendi has written a major, well-researched book of 608 pages, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,[7] as well as a more popular book: How to Be an Antiracist,[8] now read by millions. In these two works, he essentially labels everything he doesn’t like as racism: “Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be racist one minute and an antiracist the next.”[9] Interestingly, Blacks can be racists too. Those blacks who succeed in a white culture (as Kendi has done, more than most whites), are conveniently dismissed by him as assimilationists, that is, blacks who have become whites, and thus, by his definition have become racists. This was the great failing of his black parents, Larry and Carol Rogers. One became an accountant, and the other a business analyst, on whom Kendi depended for his launch into success. “My parents… fed me the mantra that education and hard work would uplift me, just as it had uplifted them.”[10] This mantra is racist. They bought into the racist norms of white culture, in which they succeeded. The title of Daniel Greenfield’s article on Kendi is sad but accurate: “Ibram X. Kendi’s Parents Worked to Give Him a Good Life. He Called Them Racists.” The subtitle is even more disturbing: “Critical Race Theory Makes Children into Enemies of their Parents.”
This is what might be considered a “trivial” form of racism, by which a black kid succeeds in white culture and resents it. Other trivial forms help nevertheless to construct the racist ideology. Dominique Wilkins, a Hall of Famer, complained of discrimination in the pages of the Daily Mail. Wilkins described an experience in which a greeter of Le Bilboquet, an upscale Atlanta restaurant, looked him up and down then refused to seat him on the grounds that they were trying to “keep a level of elegance.” Does the fact that one doorman refused service to a black man make the culture racist? Wilkins then says, seeking to shame the restaurant: “I’ve never got turned down by a single restaurant in my life until this new restaurant. I’ve been to all the top restaurants in the city – that’s better food – and they’ve never turned me down.”[11] In what way does “one” rejection as over against “all” the other restaurants prove systemic racism, as so many contend? When white supremacy is defined as the imposition on blacks of general norms of politeness, rationality and punctuality, then anything is racist and any commonly imposed standard in any culture, whether white, brown, yellow or black, are supremacist—just name the color or race, depending where you live. The term becomes so all-inclusive that it becomes indefinable—yet you must always feel guilty!
Kendi’s entire worldview, despite its trappings of sham Africanism, is white.[12] Kendi’s success depends upon his massive and moving historical account of the experience of blacks in America, beginning with the descriptions of black suffering in southern slavery, and then describing the post-war Jim Crow era evils of inhuman treatment and lynching. These incidents are despicable and it is important to recognize them as the hatred they are. But his emotive appeals to the past to give content to his present descriptions of “racism” fail to convince, since his sense of racism stems from the common sense approach his parents took in dealing with a dangerous world: his father put a basketball court in their backyard because he was worried about his son getting shot. In the end Ibram X. Kendi cannot define racism. In the keynote address at the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) he claims: “There is no in-between safe space of being ‘not racist.’ The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.” But who is to know the heart and who has the authority to say what is true?
Politics to the Rescue?
Guilt-inducing racism is being employed as a political tool, imposed on the schools, teaching children that they are collectively and individually responsible for racism by virtue of their skin color. It is now taught in the corporations and the military, creating a general sense of guilt where no specific cases of racism can be identified—thus having to use vague terms like “unconscious bias,” “implicit bias” and “structural racism,” which produce in political terms disempowerment for “the guilty racists” and empowerment for the pure accusers.
Gen. Raymond, the Chief of Space Operations, told the “guardians” of the Space Force that their oath to protect and defend the Constitution meant racism was “an enemy we must defeat” by fighting unconscious biases and owning the problem by having “uncomfortable conversations.”[13] Buzz words like “unconscious bias” and “implicit bias” and “structural racism” (illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act) give the ideological game away. As Daniel Greenfield notes: “When there are no significant racists, the promoters of systemic racism conspiracy theories claim that they’re hiding in the shadows. At the time the country ratified the United States Constitution, it codified white supremacy as the law of the land. “Systemic racism” was outlawed under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so if it existed there would be a flood of lawsuits and billions of dollars in penalties. There is no such flood because ‘systemic racism’ remains chiefly in the ideologically twisted minds of leftists and the people they seduce.”[14] The Airforce is also under attack. Its Office of the Inspector General has also been tasked with producing the controversial report alleging systemic racism in the Air Force. Essentially, citizenship, and thus politics, is being reduced to highly subjective personal identity issues that keep changing.
The dangers of employing racist ideology for political reasons becomes clear as Kendi separates the national culture into tribes based on skin color and ethnicity. The accusation of racism that Kendi presents has to go beyond the “faults” of his pro-white parents, otherwise the problem disappears. But for ideologues the problem must not disappear. In order that it not disappear, blacks must understand the ideology of distinctive black culture, a developing movement called black nationalism. Kendi, raised as Henry Rogers, now proves his black nationalism by his name change to a truly “African” name: Ibram Kendi. Black nationalism is based in part on academic Black Studies and the anti-white and anti-Semitic teaching of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. This mythological explanation argues that whites are an inferior race that committed the “black African Holocaust,” and who were created by an evil wizard, Yacub.[15]
More seriously, but just as dangerous, is the theory of white racism proposed by Dr. Donald Moss, a white psychologist, in his recently published article in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. With great academic seriousness, Moss argues that white people possess an “entitled dominion” that enables the “host” to wield power “without limit, force without restriction, violence without mercy,” and increases one’s desire to “terrorize.”[16] A further talk, entitled “Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” by psychiatrist Dr. Aruna Khilanani, was delivered at Yale to medical students and faculty in April 2021. During the talk Khilanani confessed to the desire to want to shoot white people in the head “in order to do the world a favor.”[17]
Tribal Racism and Group Power
Racism in these cases is defined in tribal terms of group power, not in the unifying civic terms of the original Founders, who believed that “all human individuals are created equal” and that every individual’s opinion must be respected. As a social theory, this “tribal group” theory will divide the culture, and perhaps that is its goal. The nation is becoming fundamentally divided with unfalsifiable accusations, making social alliances depend on tribal divisions.
The irony, as Greenfield notes, is that “today’s black nationalist is a suburban college kid nurtured by a middle class, two-parent family, [a kid] who denounces the suburbs, the middle class, and families like his as racist.”[18] That is, in the words of Shakespeare, “much to do about nothing.” But it is a serious business. It is leading the country into the kind of warmed-up Marxism that Kendi and other radicals peddle as essential to their identity politics. Kendi and other movement leaders, such as those in the Black Lives Matter movement, have tasted power by guilting the society of racist evil. They now want to transform guilty America into a communist nation. Kendi has called for the end of capitalism. “He wants to overthrow the system by becoming the system,”[19] and Patrice Cullors of BLM is seeking a Marxist regime in place of the present system. All are using Critical Race Theory to bring down the present civilization based on individual rights and reasoned discourse.
Christian Reactions
The danger for Christians is to begin affirming a kind of “spiritual” social justice that is deeply connected to revolutionary politics. The goal of wokeness is a unified culture, which turns out to be a Marxist utopia controlled by sinful, fallible human beings—a system in which God is totally absent. This is a final political form of pagan Oneism, which is a definition of hell, as many examples of past Marxism shows. Take for instance the diabolical rule of Stalin. As head of the party, he personally arrested top Soviet leaders, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Yagoda, Radek and others, forced them to “confess” their questioning of his wisdom, and then murdered them.[20] Stalin decided to eliminate all the successful farmers in the Ukraine by forcing them to work on collective farms and to sell their wheat to enrich Soviet Russia “for the good of the party.” He also kept wheat from those who were raising it, which led to the death of four million Ukrainians by starvation, which, in turn, gave rise to the Ukrainian term Holodomor (Holor: starvation, and Mor: death). This crime was kept secret from the West by the Soviet regime, and was denounced by just one brave Western journalist, a Welshman, Gareth Jones, who was murdered for his pains.[21] The danger for the church is the same as that for the German church in the 1930s, which affirmed the rise of Germany and never denounced the evil anti-semitic ideology—producing enormous amounts of genuine guilt when the holocaust became known.
One wonders how the church will deal with endlessly subjective racial guilt and deep division, as Voddie Baucham warns in his book, Fault Lines. He predicts “a disagreement between well-meaning brothers and sisters” and sees the environment within evangelicalism as in some sense already “hostile,” as we approach “an unavoidable…catastrophe.” So deep are the fault lines, he believes, that “the question is not if but when the catastrophe strikes.”[22]
Christianity is the sole hope for a society breaking apart. It is the only God-given, truthful source to provide a universal understanding of human dignity and human equality, taken for granted by many thinking people.[23] These notions are the only hope for uniting humanity and solving problems like racism. Scripture begins with a principle of Creator/creation Twoism. As creatures, we all share the same humanity because we were all made by the same Creator. Yet we are distinct from one another and distinct in our very essence from the Creator himself, while still bearing his image. For this reason, all humanity is united, no matter what tribe we belong to. God’s values apply to all tribes, nations and races. We all carry the same stain of sin and the same longing for deliverance. Our common identity and morality hold humanity together. Our only hope is the atoning death of our common Creator who took on our humanity and died for our salvation. In Christianity, there are not two forms of humanity, as in the CRT system, where there are the evil oppressors and the noble oppressed. In Scripture there are individual sinners who sin in different ways by breaking God’s various laws, but need forgiveness in the same way.
Racism is a sin. According to Merriam Webster, racism is: “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Such a view of humanity never appears in the Bible, which declares all human beings as created (originally) good and equally in God’s image. Though God recognizes distinct nations and tribes (see Acts 17:26, for example), those nations are “made one” in Christ (Eph 2:13–14). There is no place for racism. In fact, Jesus says: “Love your enemies: Do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27). Christians must respond to this command in obedience. The church of the Lord Jesus Christ is a mixture of all kinds of tongues and races, anticipating the heavenly, multi-racial event:
After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands (Rev 7:9).
Showing hatred to your brother or sister is a sin that must be confessed, and in Scripture there is a process for this, with the goal of forgiveness. The solution is not general accusations or constant slurs but moral confrontation.
If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector (Matthew18:16-17).
This granting of forgiveness said Jesus, was to be done “seventy times seven” (Matt 18;22). CRT limits sin to human oppression. There is no sense of sin against a merciful God. In this view, oppressors are forever guilty and the oppressed are always innocent. This means that genuine forgiveness and reconciliation are ruled out a priori. In the Bible, the universality of human guilt before God destroys the convenient but false binary of bad oppressor and good oppressed, a situation in which there is no room for forgiveness.
Here is a last word. A worldview without forgiveness, such as the worldview of CRT, offers no hope. There is no vision of a world in which this sin is defeated or redeemed, much less one in which the guilty are forgiven and restored. But the great message the gospel brings to the world and serves as a reminder to the church is this: When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven” (Luke 5:20).
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.
[1] Vasko Kohlmayer, The West in Crisis: Civilizations and their Death Drives (2020).
[2] Vasko Kohlmayer, “Misplaced Contrition: The Psychological Origin of White Guilt,” AMERICANTHINKER (May 9, 2021).
[3] Kohlmayer, “Misplaced Contrition.”
[4] Art.cit.
[5] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/06/vasko-kohlmayer/truth-about-america-why-we-are-not-a-racist-nation/
[6] See also the testimony of Yukong Zhao, “America’s Founding Beats the Chinese Communist Party’s,” National Review, 2021. As someone who escaped Communist China and now lives in democratic America, Yukong Zhao, compares the founding of America with that of the founding of Communist China. He states: “The Great Leap Forward, Mao’s Communist utopian experiment, starved 30 million Chinese people to death. The Cultural Revolution Mao launched destroyed 3,000 years of Chinese cultural heritage, murdered tens of thousands of people, and led to economic collapse in China…. Deng Xiaoping wisely abandoned most of the Communist ideology and started learning from the West after he took power in 1978. Politically, Deng stopped the Communist Class Struggle Movement. Economically, he gradually abolished the Communist doctrine of state ownership and planned economy and introduced private ownership, the free-market system, and modern technologies from the West. …In spite of its economic and technological progress, the Chinese government has not provided individual and political freedom to its people…. To pursue individual freedom, tens of thousands of Chinese emigrate to industrial nations each year. Their favorite destination is America. …In the late 18thcentury, America was founded upon a number of key principles: freedom of speech, rule of the law, the free-market system, checks and balances, democracy, equality, and meritocracy. Since then, Americans have led the world [in so many areas].” … And thanks to the civil-rights movement, America again lived up to its founding principles, abolishing all the laws that discriminated against black and Hispanic Americans.”
[7] Bold Type Books, 2017.
[8] New York, One World, 2019.
[9] Cited in https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/ibram-x-kendis-parents-worked-give-him-good-life-daniel-greenfield/
[10] Greenfield, art.cit.
[11] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9773729/NBA-legend-Dominique-Wilkins-opens-time-discrimination-faced.html
[12] Greenfield, art.cit.
[13]https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/general-raymond-takes-space-force-war-against-daniel-greenfield
[14] Art.cit.
[15] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/nation-islam
[16] https://meaww.com/who-is-dr-donald-moss-psychoanalyst-calls-whiteness-malignant-parasitic-like-condition-journal-paper.
[17] Aruna Khilanani slammed as ‘pathologically racist’ after her ‘shoot whites’ Yale talk | MEAWW. See also https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white-mind.1443926/
[18] Art.cit.
[19] Greenfield, art.cit.
[20] William F. Jasper, “Lysenkoism: The Danger of Politicized Science,” New American (5 July, 2021).
[21] The other journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, who denounced Stalin’s crimes, did so anonymously and survived.
[22] Voddie T. Baucham, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelical’s Looming Catastrophe, (Salem Books, 2012), 137–8.
[23] See the helpful article by John Stonestreet, “Why wokeness is a Christian Heresy,” Breakpoint, 23 July, 2021. https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3975448/posts
Guilty, Anyone? — The Aquila Report
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